“10 From 11” Song by Song - “The Snowy Owl”

For me, “The Snowy Owl” is more of a interlude than a song. At least when the album is absorbed as a unified construct it is. It’s pretty far from what I typically do when I’m rapping.

I’ve written a lot of songs over the years. Not all good songs, not all songs anyone will ever hear, but songs I wrote and recorded and might have showed to some friends, or might have thrown on soundcloud to collect dust, or performed at some party sometime. It’s taught me that you have to vary your approach to things on a track by track basis, or it’s going to start to feel boring. For me that’s how it is at least. So I knew, as soon as the idea to do 10 songs in 10 days hit me, that I’d need to throw some curve balls to keep things interesting for myself. Here’s hoping that translates to the album itself and that listeners can appreciate a change of pace from verse chorus verse structuring.

The story I tell here is from the perspective of 2 different characters. One’s me as “guy in the chair” (which is a classic trope in spy/superhero scenarios) and the other’s a super hero called The Owl, a basic vigilante Batman prototype. Designing a cool super hero wasn’t really important here. I have plenty of better ideas for that. Here, I figured since the owl is often a bad omen in the lore of the Blackfoot people (who’s land I’m sitting on), it was a good stand in symbol to be striking fear into evil in my fever dream version of the city. Does better in the cold too. So, well trained, well funded, with a cape, silent in the night on the rooftops. Good enough.

There’s actually a snowy owl who we see across the street while we smoke on our balcony on occasion. So I guess that, and the local venue by the same name probably have something to do with the inspiration for this one as well.

My rhymes are much less structured than they normally would be in a song. I wanted to try to make most of what I was saying something that a person might actually say in conversation, which isn’t the way I’d normally approach a lyric. In songs you can get away with especially expressive emotion and Stan Lee styled alliterations. Lyrical lingering mostly gets a green light when I’m making art. On “The Snowy Owl”, I was more concerned with the story, trying to come up with something linear, that had some sort of conclusion to it. Planning what I wanted to accomplish was the first step. The rhyming it all together was sort of more of an afterthought that ended up keeping me awake recording into the next morning. I’m pretty sure the sun was up by the time I slept after this day long song creation session.

The last lines in the song, about it being the Mayor, is a little joke for locals. Our current Mayor here in Lethbridge, Chris Spearman, is a bit of a love him or hate him figure, since he’s been very progressive with policy choices in a city that has a lot of vocal people who hate it when society advances past their bullshit. I love the scientifically backed choices he’s made, but I know there’s a whole lot of people who have popped into comment sections blasting him as well, talking about how his advocacy for harm reduction was luring drug users to town, ect ect. After working at the local SCS, I thought the last thing anyone would expect from a story written by me was for him to be the bad guy. I don’t name him or anything, but it’s an inside joke like “oh ya, of course, the grey haired mayor is the reason all the drugs are in town! we solved it Scoob!” Juvenile thinking in action. The type of thinking that got the SCS here, the busiest one anywhere, closed for no good reason.

Same time of course, in this song I’m actually pointing to a lot of problems with the way the “war on drugs” is currently being fought. I talk about The Owl doing recon work to track down who’s actually bringing in the shipments, and investigating how those people are connected to power and policy makers. That’s my real opinions and suspicions showing, that part’s not tongue in cheek. Even on a song where I’m pretending I’m a costumed crusader I’m going to give some social commentary. Word to Dead Prez and the “we don’t own planes or boats, so tell me, where the fuck we getting all this coke?" line.

Our current drug laws are punishing poor people and ignoring the people with old institutional money, on a lot of levels. I advocate for the decriminalization of all drugs. Safe supply saves lives. So does harm reduction. Shooting people, choking people, beating people, tazing people, and sending them to jail over stolen bike warrants, midnight jay walking, or petty drug charges doesn’t help anything. It perpetuates cycles of negativity. There are always more struggling people, willing to step in to take the place of whoever gets arrested, in the desperate hopes of making some money and getting out of the meat grinder.

It’s thoughts like these that got me dreaming about being saved from the situation by some masked vigilantes.

Stay Up.